American Holocaust, part II: the consummate fascist act…

December 21, 2009

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(“Nearly ten years ago I declared myself a pro-lifer. A Jewish, atheist, civil libertarian, left-wing pro-lifer. Immediately, three women editors at The Village Voice, my New York base, stopped speaking to me. Not long after, I was invited to speak on this startling heresy at Nazareth College in Rochester (long since a secular institution). Two weeks before the lecture, it was canceled. The women on the lecture committee, I was told by the embarrassed professor who had asked me to come, had decided that there was a limit to the kind of speech the students could safely hear, and I was outside that limit. I was told, however, that I could come the next year to give a different talk. Even the women would very much like me to speak about one of my specialties, censorship in America. I went and was delighted to talk about censorship at Nazareth.”)

[Journalist Nat Hentoff, from “Pro-choice bigots: a view from the pro-life left”; 30 November 1992]

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“At the heart of the controversy in these cases are those recurring pregnancies that pose no danger whatsoever to the life or health of the mother but are, nevertheless, unwanted for any one or more of a variety of reasons — convenience, family planning, economics, dislike of children, the embarrassment of illegitimacy, etc.”

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“I find nothing in the language or history of the Constitution to support the court’s judgment. The court simply fashions and announces a new constitutional right for pregnant mothers and, with scarcely any reason or authority for its action, invests that right with sufficient substance to override most existing state abortion statutes.”

“Aware that in Roe it essentially created something out of nothing and that there are many in this country who hold that decision to be basically illegitimate, the Court responds defensively…. I do not share the warped point of view of the majority, nor can I follow the tortuous path the majority treads in proceeding to strike down the statute before us. I dissent.”

“It was my pseudonym, ‘Jane Roe,’ which had been used to create the ‘right’ to abortion out of legal thin air. But [attorneys] Sarah Weddington and Linda Coffee never told me that what I was signing would allow women to come up to me 15, 20 years later and say, ‘Thank you for allowing me to have my five or six abortions. Without you, it wouldn’t have been possible.’ Sarah never mentioned women using abortions as a form of birth control. We talked about truly desperate and needy women, not women already wearing maternity clothes.”

[Norma McCorvey, the anonymous litigant known as “Jane Roe” in the landmark abortion case, Roe v. Wade, in testimony to the Senate Subcommittee on the Constitution, Federalism and Property Rights, 21 January 1998]

[letter to Daphne Claire de Jong, former member of Feminists for Life, 20 December 2009]

Thanks again for taking the time to help.

I have, in fact, some ideas on the matter of feminism—quote-unquote—which have coalesced into an essay I wrote at a blog I keep.

My intention was to develop further the argument I posed, and address the abortion issue—or ought one more properly refer to it either as the abortion crisis or abortion holocaust?

I had mentioned that I spotted your name at Wikiquote. It is instructive for me to look over the ocean of opinions on the matter at that web page. They have them alphabetized and I’ve managed to get through them to the ‘B’s—with much digressive research when I spot something particularly compelling.

Some of the pro-abortion commentary is clearly misandrist in its impetus—there can be no doubt whatsoever about it. And, further, I know that the writer’s focus had become clouded by personal animus, and ought to be read—or dismissed—with that in mind.

If time—and inclination—permit, please visit the blog I had mentioned. It is:

…[current blog URL]

…with one essay addressing misandry. If there is one theme which underwrites that commentary it is this: the “feminist” is a Self (with a history, psychology, etc.) prior to being a member of a collective, and to lose sight of this fact is to see the vital cause of women’s rights degenerate into something else. If truth—as Keats writes—is beauty, then a lie may be viewed as something grotesque. Such is my conclusion when considering the “feminist” and abortion rights—so-called: “feminism” as grotesquerie.

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To the degree that I am a humanist (and that is so) I am a feminist. However, 1) I cannot abjure my belief that freedom exists as a relative construct—relative to, e.g., yours—and, 2), that Lord Acton was correct in his pronouncement upon Power being a corrupting dynamic—whoever courts it, and whoever wields it.

Yet, within the realm of basic human rightsevery human being has a categorical right to nine months gestation—full stop. And, that fundamental right supersedes always-relative freedom. And, the violent halting of gestation is not a fundamental human right but merely a now-juridical “privilege” that one lays claim to.

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Life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness are termed unalienable rights—i.e., unalienable, even via legislation—with the right to life superseding the other two. How can there be any doubt about that essential truth?

About the blog: it is decidedly left-of-center in its political outlook. That is, I am an anarchist—non-violent anarchist, of course.

Dean

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[What follows is a survey of the commentary (from Wikiquote)]

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“If partial-birth abortions remain legal, if Congress allows them to continue, what next? Killing a child who has emerged from the womb 3 or 4 more inches… Opponents of this bill keep asking whether it would be the first step in an effort to ban all abortions, but the real question is whether allowing this procedure is not a step toward legalized infanticide.”

[Abortion is] the dirty work of our field. The sad truth is that the people who moonlight at the clinics are grade-B doctors. They’re not the cream of the crop

Anonymous pro-choice OB/GYN, quoted by Jack Hitt in “Who Will Do Abortions Here?

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“All the articles on this subject that I have read have been from men. They denounce women as alone guilty, and never include man in any plans for the remedy. . . Guilty? Yes. No matter what the motive, love of ease, or a desire to save from suffering the unborn innocent, the woman is awfully guilty who commits the deed [abortion]. It will burden her conscience in life, it will burden her soul in death; But oh, thrice guilty is he who drove her to the desperation which impelled her to the crime!”
“We want prevention, not merely punishment. We must reach the root of the evil [abortion]…It is practiced by those whose inmost souls revolt from the dreadful deed.”

“Nobody wants to perform abortions after ten weeks because by then you see the features of the baby, hands, feet. It’s really barbaric. There are a lot of tears. Sometimes patients turn on you. They say ‘Let’s get out of here,’ after the abortion, like you are some dirty person. It’s vicious. Then you get these teenyboppers in the office who laugh their way through it. It doesn’t mean a thing to them. That bothers me…I do them [abortions] because I take the attitude that women are going to terminate babies and deserve the same kind of treatment as women who carry babies…I’ve done a couple thousand and it turned into a significant financial boon, but I also feel I’ve provided an important service. The only way I can do an abortion is to consider only the woman and block out the baby…”

“Of the various ways to perform abortion after the midpoint of pregnancy, there is only one that never, ever results in live births. It is D&E (dilation and evacuation) and not only is it foolproof, but many researchers consider it safer, cheaper, and less unpleasant for the patient. However, it is particularly stressful to medical personnel. This is because D&E requires literally cutting the fetus from the womb, and then reassembling the parts, or at least keeping them all in view, to assure that the abortion is complete…”

“It was disturbing for me to see recognizable body parts in the removed tissue, usually an arm or a leg. My intent is not to be gruesome, but there is a reality behind all the political jargon that I believe I allowed myself to ignore until this experience. I have images now that accompany phrases such as, ‘Potential for life’ and I understand the emotions that drive pro-life forces…”

“You’re going from dealing with people to dealing with what most people here at the Center consider a real hurdle, to do sterile room, because you have to deal with the actual abortion tissue. And for some people that’s really hard. They can be abstractly in favor of abortion rights, but they sure don’t want to see what an eighteen-week abortion looks like.”

“So by it looking like a baby, you’re associating it with yourself because you used to be a baby, you used to be a fetus.”
Anonymous clinic worker Abortion at Work: Ideology and Practice in a Feminist Clinic Wendy Simonds

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“When I can identify the four chambers of the heart, I start feeling miserable. And when I put my hands on somebody to feel how big they are and I get kicked, I am barely able to talk at that moment.”

“You shall not kill either the fetus by abortion or the new born.”
Barnabas, circa 125

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“She who has deliberately destroyed a fetus has to pay the penalty of murder…here it is not only the child to be born that is vindicated, but also the woman herself who made an attempt against her own life, because usually the women die in such attempts. Furthermore, added to this is the destruction of the child, another murder… Moreover, those, too, who give drugs causing abortion are deliberate murderers themselves, as well as those receiving the poison which kills the fetus.”
“Let her that procures abortion undergo ten years’ penance, whether the embryo were perfectly formed, or not.”
St. Basil the Great, Letter 188:2, circa 370

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“[I]n face of erroneous interpretations of freedom, [Pope John Paul II] emphasized in an unequivocal way the inviolability of the human being, the inviolability of human life from its conception until natural death. The freedom to kill is not true freedom, but a tyranny that reduces the human being to slavery.”
Pope Benedict XVI, homily (May 7, 2005)

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“When a man steals to satisfy hunger, we may safely conclude that there is something wrong in society. So when a woman destroys the life of her unborn child, it is an evidence that either by education or circumstances she has been greatly wronged.”

“They can be born breathing and crying at 19 weeks’ gestation. . . I am not anti-abortion, but as far as I am concerned this is sub-standard medicine. . . If viability is the basis on which they set the 24-week limit for abortion, then the simplest answer is to change the law and reduce the upper limit to 18 weeks.”
Stuart Campbell, former professor of obstetrics and gynaecology at London’s St. George’s hospital

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“300 Dollars that’s the price of living what? / Mommy I don’t like this clinic / Hopefully you’ll make the right decision / And don’t go through with the Knife incision”
Nick Cannon, hip hop artist and comedian, describing his mother’s choice not to abort him, in “Can I Live?”

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“I know that the fetus is alive during the process most of the time because I can see fetal heartbeat on the ultrasound. . . I think brain death would occur because the suctioning to remove contents is only two or three seconds, so somewhere in that period of time, obviously not when you penetrate the skull, because people get shot in the head and they don’t die immediately from that, if they are going to die at all, so that probably is not sufficient to kill the fetus, but I think removing the brain contents eventually will. . . My intent in every abortion I have ever done is to kill the fetus and terminate the pregnancy.”
Leroy Carhart, abortion provider, Asheville Tribune

“This act covers every D&E [dilation and evacuation] that I did. Everything that I do to cause an abortion is an overt act. . . The fetuses are alive at the time of delivery. [There is a heartbeat] very frequently.”
Leroy Carhart, Carhart v. Ashcroft

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“If you haven’t seen what abortion does, then you will never understand what abortion actually is.”
“Between 1882 and 1968, 3,446 Blacks were lynched in the U.S. That number is surpassed in less than 3 days by abortion. 1,452 African-American children are killed each day by the heinous act of abortion. 3 out of 5 pregnant African-American women will abort their child. Since 1973 there has been over 13 million Black children killed and their precious mothers victimized by the U.S. abortion.”
Clenard Howard Childress, Jr., Life Education And Resource Network

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“How is the person who considers abortion to be murder any different from the Pole who knew what was going to happen at Auschwitz? If the Pole was morally obligated to attempt to save lives, isn’t the person who opposes abortion under the same obligation?”
B.D. Colen, The Anti-Abortion High Ground

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“[The few doctors willing to replace those who are retiring are] mostly physicians who have had difficulty establishing regular ob-gyn practices. . . Out of [one abortion practitioner’s] first six months of work, there are nine malpractice suits … After it was apparent the guy was a klutz, they kept using him, and trying to cover for him, because they couldn’t find another provider.”
“In testimony Wednesday in St. Louis Circuit Court, Crist said that it is not uncommon for second-trimester fetuses to leave the womb feet-first, intact and with their hearts still beating. He sometimes crushes their skulls to get the fetuses out. Other times, he dismembers them.”

Robert Crist, abortion provider

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“If women must submit to abortion to preserve their lifestyle or career, their economic or social status they are pandering to a system devised and run by men for male convenience.”
“Until this century, the laws of both Britain and America made women a part of’ their husbands. By marriage, the husband and wife are one person in law. . . our law in general considers man and wife one person. The one person was, of course, the husband, who exerted absolute power over his wife and her property. She had no existence and therefore no protection under the law. The only thing a husband could not do was kill her. The earliest feminist battles were fought against the legal chattel status of women. Many feminists were among those who overturned the U.S. Supreme Court decision of 1857, that a black slave was ‘property’ and not entitled to the protection of the Constitution. Feminism totally rejected the concept of ownership in regard to human beings. Yet when the Court ruled in 1973 that the fetus was the property of its mother, and not entitled to the protection of the Constitution, ‘liberated’ women danced in the streets.”
Daphne Clair de Jong, “Feminism and Abortion: The Great Inconsistency”

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“I do think abortion is murder—of a very special and necessary sort. What else would one call the deliberate stilling of a life? And no physician involved with the procedure ever kids himself about that…legalistic distinctions among ‘homicide,’ ‘justified homicide,’ ‘self-defense,’ and ‘murder’ appear to me a semantic game. What difference does it make what we call it? Those who do it and those who witness its doing know that abortion is the stilling of a life.”
Magda Denes, abortion advocate, clinical psychologist and psychoanalyst, “Performing Abortions,” Commentary Magazine (October, 1976)

“There was not one [abortion practitioner] who at some point in the questioning did not say ‘This is murder.'”
Magda Denes, “In Necessity and Sorrow; Life and Death Inside an Abortion Clinic”

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“The difference between the way of life and the way of death is great. Therefore, do not murder a child by abortion or kill a newborn infant.”The Didache, book of Christian apostolic teachings, c. 80 A.D.

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“Sonography in connection with induced abortion may have psychological hazards. Seeing a blown-up, moving image of the embryo she is carrying can be distressing to a woman who is about to undergo an abortion, Dr. Sally Faith Dorfman noted. She stressed that the screen should be turned away from the patient.”
Sally Faith Dorfman, paraphrased in Obstetrics and Gynecology News

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“To discover that abortion was one of the greatest crime-lowering factors in American history is, needless to say, jarring. It feels less Darwinian than Swiftian; it calls to mind a long ago dart attributed to G. K. Chesterton: when there aren’t enough hats to go around, the problem isn’t solved by lopping off some heads. The crime drop was, in the language of economists, an ‘unintended benefit’ of legalized abortion. But one need not oppose abortion on moral or religious grounds to feel shaken by the notion of a private sadness being converted into a public good.”
Stephen J. Dubner and Steven D. Levitt, “Where Have All the Criminals Gone? Want to understand what made the crime rate drop in the 1990s? Look back to the Roe v. Wade decision in 1973″

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“No doctor, for ethical, moral or honest reasons wants to do nothing but abortions…women don’t like to do abortions over and over for moral reasons. Sometimes our women doctors become pregnant themselves, which upsets the patients. At the same time, if a woman is carrying a baby, she doesn’t like to abort someone else’s. We have much more trouble keeping women doctors on the staff than men.”
Edward Eichner, director of medicine at a Cleveland abortion facility, quoted in Rachel Weeping and Other Essays About Abortion

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“I remain pro-choice. I am not religious. I am an atheist and a rationalist. The findings did surprise me, but the results appear to be very robust because they persist across a series of disorders and a series of ages. . . . Abortion is a traumatic life event; that is, it involves loss, it involves grief, it involves difficulties. And the trauma may, in fact, predispose people to having mental illness.”
Professor David M. Fergusson, Christchurch Health and Development Study, commenting on research he directed, interviewed on Australian Broadcasting Corporation (March 1, 2006).

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“When you’re a doctor who does these abortions and the leaders of your movement appear before Congress and go on network news and say these procedures are done in only the most tragic of circumstances, how do you think that makes you feel? You know they’re primarily done on healthy women and healthy fetuses, and it makes you feel like a dirty little abortionist with a dirty little secret. I think we should tell them the truth, let them vote and move on. In the vast majority of cases, the procedure is performed on a healthy mother with a healthy fetus that is 20 weeks or more along. The abortion-rights folks know it, the anti-abortion folks know it, and so, probably, does everyone else.”
“One of the facts of abortion is that women enter abortion clinics to kill their fetuses. It is a form of killing, you’re ending a life.”

Ron Fitzsimmons, Executive Director of the National Coalition of Abortion Providers, in “An Abortion Rights Advocate Says He Lied About Procedure”, New York Times (February 26, 1997).

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“Lively activities [are] observed by ultrasound in the tenth week, when babies rarely pause for more than five minutes.”
Geraldine Lux Flanagan, Beginning Life 62 (1996).

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“No matter how it is worded or performed, abortion hurts women. This won’t stop until women stand up in unison and say, ‘This is unacceptable. We deserve better.’ Lack of emotional and financial resources are the real undue burden and abortion will never lift that.”
Serrin Foster, president of Feminists For Life

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“[I]t seems to me as clear as daylight that abortion would be a crime.”
Mahatma Gandhi, All Men Are Brothers: The Life and Thoughts of Mahatma Gandhi As Told In His Own Words

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“For God…has conferred on men the surpassing ministry of safeguarding life…Therefore from the moment of its conception life must be guarded with the greatest care while abortion and infanticide are unspeakable crimes.”Gaudium et Spes (Pastoral Constitution on the Church in the Modern World), Second Vatican Council, promulgated December 7, 1965.

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“[H]e was sometimes surprised by the anger a late-term abortion can arouse in him. On the one hand, the physician said, he is angry at the woman. ‘But paradoxically,’ he added, ‘I have angry feelings at myself for feeling good about grasping the calvaria [the top of the baby’s head], for feeling good about doing a technically good procedure which destroys a fetus, kills a baby.'”
D.M. Gianelli, quoting anonymous New Mexico abortion practitioner, in “Abortion providers share inner conflicts,” American Medical News, July 12, 1993.

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“To earlier feminists who had fought for the vote and for fair treatment in the workplace, it had seemed obvious that the ready availability of abortion would facilitate the sexual exploitation of women. Women like Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton regarded free love, abortion, and easy divorce as disastrous for women and children. They would have regarded women who actively promoted those causes as foolish or deranged.”
Mary Ann Glendon, “The Women of ‘Roe v. Wade'”, First Things, June/July 2003

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“The custom of procuring abortions has reached such appalling proportions in America as to be beyond belief…So great is the misery of the working classes that seventeen abortions are committed in every one hundred pregnancies.”
Emma Goldman, Mother Earth

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“Only now are we beginning to consider … the concept that the fetus is a patient, an individual”
M.R. Harrison, The Unborn Patient: Pre-Natal Diagnosis and Treatment

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“No one, neither the patient receiving an abortion, nor the person doing the abortion, is ever, at anytime, unaware that they are ending a life…”
William F. Harrison, abortion provider, “Why I Provide Abortions” 1996

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Reporter: [Is] the fetus . . . dead beforehand…?
Haskell: No, it’s really not. . . in my case, I would think probably about a third of those are definitely. . . dead before I actually start to remove the fetus. And probably the other two-thirds are not.
Reporter: Is the skull procedure also done to make sure that the fetus is dead so you’re not going to have the problem of a live birth?
Haskell: It’s immaterial. If you can’t get it out, you can’t get it out. . . The point here is to effect a safe legal abortion. I mean, you could say the same thing about the D&E [dilation and evacuation] procedure. You know, why do you do the D&E procedure? Why do you crush the fetus up inside the womb? To kill it before you take it out? Well, that happens, yes. But that’s not why you do it. You do it to get it out. I could do the same thing with a D&E procedure…But that’s not really the point. The point here is you’re attempting to do an abortion. And that’s the goal of your work, is to complete an abortion. . .
Reporter: I wanted to make sure I have both you and (Dr.) McMahon saying ‘No’ then. That this is misinformation, these letters to the editor saying it’s only done when the baby’s already dead, in case of fetal demise and you have to do an autopsy. But some of them are saying they’re getting that information from NAF [National Abortion Federation]. Have you talked to Barbara Radford or anyone over there?
Haskell: Well, I had heard that they were giving that information, somebody over there might be giving information like that out. The people that staff the NAF office are not medical people. And many of them when I gave my paper, many of them came in, I learned later, to watch my paper because many of them have never seen an abortion performed of any kind.
Reporter: Did you also show a video when you did that?
Haskell: Yeah. I taped a procedure a couple of years ago, a very brief video, that simply showed the technique. The old story about a picture’s worth a thousand words.
Reporter: As National Right to Life will tell you.
Haskell: Afterwards they were just amazed. They just had no idea. And here they’re rabid supporters of abortion. They work in the office there. And…some of them have never seen one performed…And I’ll be quite frank: most of my abortions are elective in that 20-24 week range…In my particular case, probably 20% are for genetic reasons. And the other 80% are purely elective…

Martin Haskell, abortion provider, American Medical News

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“The early feminists found abortion to be the ultimate exploitation of women. [Women had to] become men to compete. We bought into that. We’re smarter today. It’s more empowering to go through with your pregnancy.”
Patricia Heaton, Washington Times

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“Nearly ten years ago I declared myself a pro-lifer. A Jewish, atheist, civil libertarian, left-wing pro-lifer. Immediately, three women editors at The Village Voice, my New York base, stopped speaking to me. Not long after, I was invited to speak on this startling heresy at Nazareth College in Rochester (long since a secular institution). Two weeks before the lecture, it was canceled. The women on the lecture committee, I was told by the embarrassed professor who had asked me to come, had decided that there was a limit to the kind of speech the students could safely hear, and I was outside that limit.”